Episode 541: Jon McNeill: Why “Less” and “Simple” are the Smartest Growth Strategies

6:43Jen Cohen:So I think they looked at where we were from. They're like, nobody's going to take these jobs. We'll just put these guys on it. And so we became lifelong friends. Because what else are you going to do in a meatpacking company? Yeah.

6:55Jon McNeill:That's crazy. So when you said, like, when you said Survey Monkey, didn't it click right away? And then when you said Sheryl Sandberg, you were friends with her, it kind of all made sense. So you met Sheryl, obviously, through David.

7:07Jen Cohen:Yeah, she loved my friend Dave, and I loved her for that. She's just fantastic. And so Dave, as you know, passed. Yeah, horrible. Horrific.

7:18Jon McNeill:Did they ever find out or figure out, like, the whole situation? Besides the treadmill, like, it's...

7:23Jen Cohen:I don't know. like, I don't know, but it was just, it was horrific. And so several months after he passed, then Cheryl introduced Elon and I.

7:33Jon McNeill:Wow. Okay. So she met, you met Elon under what context? Was it like, hey, Elon's looking for a number two or hey, just meet him to talk about business? It was Elon's looking for a number two.

7:44Jen Cohen:And I sort of went into those conversations and said, I don't know if I'm your guy. I've been like my own boss. I haven't had a boss in like 20 years. and none of my companies were as big as Tesla was at that time.

7:55Jon McNeill:What year are we talking now?

7:56Jen Cohen:We're talking 2015. Okay. Yeah. And so we start to get to know each other and he's like super intense, no surprise. Yeah. And so right as we start talking, he's like, I have this problem in my factory. And so he starts to describe the problem and we start to like break down the problem and like two hours go by and we've kind of worked our way to a solution because I'd seen that kind of problem before. But what's the problem? It was a production problem with the Model X. because I couldn't get the doors to work, the Falcon Wing doors. And so he called me like two days later and he's like, I went to the factory and did what we like worked on.

8:27Jen Cohen:And it turns out it's helping. And he's like, you want to talk again? So we talked again. He's like, I have the sales problem. Have you seen this before? I'm like, yeah, here's how I think about breaking that down. And so we get on these calls, we just problem solve. And then eventually he's like, why don't you join the company?

8:44Jon McNeill:So how long were you on the phone with him problem solving? For how long? We could be on for hours. No, no, no. Like how long of a duration? I think two months? A couple of months.

8:52Jen Cohen:Yeah. A couple of months we were getting to know each other. And I just really wanted to figure out if I could help him and be useful. And it turned out there were ways I could be useful. So I decided to join the best practitioner of my craft on the planet because there weren't really no entrepreneurs. They've created like four or five companies. Each of them are worth multiple tens of billions of dollars.

9:12Jon McNeill:No. I mean, and by the way, at that time, Elon, I mean, he's a genius.

9:17Jen Cohen:He is.

9:19Jon McNeill:but he's like a crazy genius yeah right but he didn't display that amount of crazy back then exactly as people would say he has now yeah right

9:29Jen Cohen:yeah

9:29Jon McNeill:but did he have like elements did you see

9:32Jen Cohen:oh yeah like he's like he'll tell you like he's out on the spectrum and I think all geniuses are kind of out on the spectrum in some ways and yeah he's he's fun and nuts and is the smartest person you'll ever meet like literally

9:44Jon McNeill:the smartest person you'll ever meet

9:46Jen Cohen:by a factor yeah yeah Yeah.

9:48Jon McNeill:Like, like, I, how was it like, was it even, how were you even able to work? Like, how long were you at Tesla for?

9:54Jen Cohen:Close to four years.

9:55Jon McNeill:Right. Were you working with him like side by side?

9:58Jen Cohen:Yeah. Yeah. At the beginning, we'd travel constantly together because we were trying to do this Vulcan mind meld where I could learn as much from him as I could. And, and he could get, he'd get a sense of me. And so, yeah, we were together a lot.

10:10Jon McNeill:So what would be the dynamic? I mean, you being the COO, him being obviously the CEO and like brain, basically the visionary, I guess, that would probably be a very, like, you'd have to have a lot of, like, social emotional IQ to know how to navigate that relationship.

10:29Jen Cohen:We actually asked Cheryl how she and Mark handled it. And we applied a few principles that they had, which is, number one, they had really good, tight definitions around what each other did. We called those sandboxes. And we said, okay, this is your sandbox. So, Elon, It was product and engineering and manufacturing. He's like, these are the three things I love. I'm like, all right, I'll take the rest. And so we would respect each other's sandboxes, which was really good. And we spent at least an hour a week together catching up on those two things. We were in sync. So it was clear what he was doing, pretty clear what I was doing.

11:05Jen Cohen:And we made it work.

11:07Jon McNeill:Really? So he didn't micromanage you?

11:08Jen Cohen:No, he was like, I think the thing that people don't realize, one of the things that's really fun about working with him is He's kind of figured out the two or three things that he has to work on that are existential for the company. And then he gives his team agency on everything else. So literally, we had agency to go run the rest of the business. And that was, for me, super fulfilling and a lot of fun. Because we were taking the business from$1.8 billion in sales when I started. 30 months later, we were at$20 billion. So we 10x the thing. So it wasn't like there was a little bit to do. There was a lot to do.

11:41Jen Cohen:There was a lot to do. All over the place. Yeah.

11:43Jon McNeill:So what was your first piece of business to kind of get that company to$20 billion?

11:50Jen Cohen:The first thing, like when he and I were getting to know each other, I was trying to figure out, could I be helpful, useful? And so I went to like, I was traveling a lot for the business that I had just started. And I went to eight different Tesla stores and took a test drive. And each store gave them a different email address so they wouldn't like catch on who I was, what I was doing. But this super crazy thing happened. And like I did eight test drives and that's supposed to be like the pinnacle of the sales process, but nobody called me back. Nobody followed up. So I called the head of sales ops and I said, Hey, look, taking eight test drives, I've gotten all the way through your sales funnel.

12:28Jen Cohen:Nobody's calling me back. What's going on? Am I like flagged in the system? He's like, no, you're not flagged in the system. I said, let me ask you a question. How many cars do you have to sell this quarter to meet your targets for wall street? He said, 12 ,000. It was a month and a half into the quarter i said how many sold he's like 3 000 i'm like you're not going to make your number you're not going to make your quarter he's like no i said tell me how many go look in the system tell me how many people have done a test drive like me and haven't been called back he's like give me an hour he calls back in an hour he's like would you believe it like 9 000 i'm like are you kidding me wow you could make your quarter all you have to do is follow up with these people why aren't you following up he's like i don't know i said okay do this, shut off all new leads to salespeople until they follow up with all their test drives.

13:13Jen Cohen:And once they've followed up with all their test drives, you can give them new leads. And he said, I can do that. I said, great, do it. Calls me back the next day. He's like, you wouldn't believe it. Like we're selling cars. I'm like, yeah, no kidding. You're following up with people. And then it dawned on me, I didn't work for Elon yet. I hadn't joined the company. So I called Elon and I said, look, I'm super sorry. I haven't had a boss in a long time. and I was acting like a CEO. And here's like, here's the context. Here's what I did. And he's got this famous long silence that I didn't know about then.

13:45Jen Cohen:And the call just goes silent. I'm like, oh my God, what have I done? And he comes on after like a minute and he's like, you know what? I think you're going to fit in here just fine. So that was the first thing. And that's how we got, it was dead simple, which I've found most of business is dead simple. If you just follow your own, like go to your front lines and figure out what's going on, you usually see what's broken in your business pretty quickly.

14:10Jon McNeill:Well, what's a couple of things I want to say? Number one is I want to know how many cars they ended up selling when they actually followed up.

14:17Jen Cohen:They made their quarter.

14:18Jon McNeill:So did they surpass it?

14:20Jen Cohen:They exceeded it by just a little bit, but it was kind of a miracle because they were halfway through the quarter and less than a quarter of the way to their goal.

14:28Jon McNeill:So how did these people not even know to like fall? To me, that's like a no-brainer, right? Like, you're going to go in for a test drive. Like, how are they going to make any, like, as a salesperson, that's how you make your money is in commissions and percentages and all these things. What kind of salespeople were you guys even hiring that they didn't even know that? Non-salespeople.

14:49Jen Cohen:We were hiring people who were passionate about the environment. And therefore, they were passionate about explaining the car. But they weren't salespeople. They weren't trained to ask for the order. And they weren't paid a commission. So they had none of the mechanics lined up for success. But what we started to do was say, we didn't pay commissions, but we started to pay bonuses to the stores based on how many cars that they sold that month. And so we were able to get a team effort going, which was non-commission based and a little bit softer, but we were able to get the incentives lined up with what we wanted to have happen.

15:22Jon McNeill:And so you went into these eight stores without a job. So what was the position with him? You were just in the midst of talking about potentially working?

15:30Jen Cohen:Like figuring out, could I be an effective number two to him?

15:34Jon McNeill:So you just were like kind of like going around. So this was on your own. Yeah. Oh, like kind of on your own accord. Hey, I'm going to go to eight stores and just do all this. Okay. So then when you called him, of course, he's going to hire you because you went above and beyond. You probably sold thousands of cars for free. And like you showed your value, like which, by the way, should be like business 101. Like everybody should be doing that.

15:56Jen Cohen:Everybody should show value. Right. If you can, like the door swing open for you. A hundred percent. And like you stand out, right?

16:02Jon McNeill:In a competitive environment. Like it wasn't like you were applying to like work at like McDonald's as like the nighttime supervisor. Right. You know, you were like applying to be like Elon's number two. I would imagine there would be stiff competition. Was he, was he like hiring, sorry, was he like interviewing and talking to a lot of people?

16:18Jen Cohen:He had talked to a bunch of people. I don't know how many people he, he was talking to a bunch of people for sure.

16:23Jon McNeill:So if you were to, when you asked him or did you ever ask him like why he made the decision to hire

16:29Jen Cohen:I never asked him that. Yeah.

16:31Jon McNeill:You never asked him that question. I never asked him that.

16:32Jen Cohen:But we did talk about it because I kept saying to him, like, I'm not your guy. Like, I think you need a big company car guy because you're becoming a big car company.

16:41Jon McNeill:Yeah.

16:41Jen Cohen:And he said, that's exactly what I don't need. I need the opposite of that. I need a fellow entrepreneur. I said, why do you need an entrepreneur? He's like, because you understand how to handle enormous risk. Like, you understand what it's like to not be able to make payroll potentially and what that feels like. And he's like, you know how to allocate capital. and I need somebody that knows how to do those two things. I'm not going to find somebody in a big company who knows how to do that. And so I think that's what he saw was just somebody who was wired like him as an entrepreneur.

17:10Jon McNeill:So can you just tell everybody, like what's the role usually of a COO versus the CEO?

17:16Jen Cohen:CEO sets the vision, hires the team, raises the capital. That's kind of the three jobs of the CEO. Set the vision, hire the team, raise the capital. and then the COO or the president has, it sort of makes trains run on time. You achieve the vision along with the team.

17:35Jon McNeill:So if he's typical, that's the reason why I was asking you is because in my experience is the CEO or the person who was like the founder like would be the one raising the capital. The COO typically doesn't have that position. No. But yet he wanted you to have that position to like be able to raise capital, you said.

17:52Jen Cohen:Well, to be able to allocate capital. So once the capital is raised, It's like, now what do you do with it? Now you do with it, yeah. And where does it get the best return? Because you can put a dollar over here, a dollar over here, a dollar over here. Where's it going to get the best return? Yeah. And that's typically what a president's pretty good at trying to figure out. Okay, now I can make the trains run on time and I can actually allocate capital to create a money machine.

18:12Jon McNeill:What I love, okay, so when I was going through this book and reading the book, what I really love is how you create these frameworks of how to actually build a thriving and successful business. how to scale, how to do all these things. And there's a lot of great little actionable things that people should really listen to that can really make a difference between a company being good to great. You know, not to talk about a different book. Let's take Jim Collins' book, yeah, which is a great book. Exactly, it is a good book. And the first thing you talk about is basically to question all the different requirements, right?

18:46Jon McNeill:Can we talk about that? What do you mean when you say question the requirements?

18:51Jen Cohen:So literally you start to question the requirements. Like, so to give you an example, like we started to say, could we sell cars online? This is 2015. Nobody's bought a$100 ,000 thing online. And we said, if we could, our cost of sale goes way down. And we were competing against big, big car companies who spend$2 ,000 to$5 ,000 per car that they sell. We didn't have that money. So we had to figure out, okay, how did we do this? We can't put a store everywhere. And so we said, how would we sell cars online? Well, you got to remove friction. Today, it takes us 64 clicks to sell a car. Could we get that down to 10?

19:28Jen Cohen:Well, the big source of the clicks is all the loan documents that people have to go through. It's like dozens and dozens of pages. So we started to question the requirements. Like, are all of these paragraphs legally required? Are they regulatorily required? And the answer was, actually, no, they're not. They were designed by lawyers over time to protect the banks that they work for. So then we said, okay, what are you really agreeing to in an auto loan? Right. Super simply, you're saying, this is the price, this is the interest rate, this is the payment, and this is the amount of time I'm going to make that payment.

20:02Jen Cohen:And we said, we can put those four things in four sentences in one paragraph. We could have a one-click loan. And nobody had ever done this before. But we just thought, let's first question the requirements, figure out all this stuff is fluff, it's not necessary. So how could we get a one-click loan? We went and talked to dozens of banks. They told us we were nuts and basically threw us out. And then we finally got to this bank in Minneapolis, U.S. Bank, and they said, we'll do it. And all of a sudden we had taken a 64-click process to buy a car down to 10. And now you can buy a car at Tesla in about the same number of clicks you could buy a pizza at Tomino's.

20:34Jen Cohen:It's amazing.

20:35Jon McNeill:That is incredible. That also is another principle that I read in the book, which is simplicity over complexity. Totally. Right? Totally. People make the most simple things much more difficult than it ever has to be in every area of life. Right. Right? Right. And so does that like, is that part of like how you kind of grew like all the businesses, all six of the business exits that you had, Tesla and also Lyft. And is that basically the whole, like whose principles that is that your principle? Was that Elon's?

21:06Jen Cohen:No, it's a guy. I learned this in my second company. I was super lucky to have a board member.

21:10Jon McNeill:Okay.

21:11Jen Cohen:Who's a mentor to me to this day. His name's Fred Massone. Okay. Fred was the first person taught by the Japanese their production system, which is all based on simplicity. And Fred told me, like, the best leaders are the greatest simplifiers. And, like, we've all heard the line, like Mark Twain's line, like, I would have written you a shorter letter if I would have taken the time. Yes. Simplifying super-duper hard. Really hard. And so he taught me how to be a simplifier. And then when I learned the power of that, it's a complete hack as a leader. And to your point, it's a life skill, too. because if you can simplify different aspects of your life, it just gets a whole lot easier to execute than complexity.

21:49Jon McNeill:And also like the time that you save, the efficiency that you save, the stress, the amount of stress that you save, all the things. Give me a few examples of how that would play out in like becoming, like growing a company or in your own life, basically.

22:08Jen Cohen:So in growing a company, I think product is at the core of every company. And if you have amazing product, people will beat a path to your door. They'll rave about it. You might spend on marketing, et cetera. And you think about some really successful companies. So take Apple, take Tesla. They don't have like 100 varieties of their product. They've got like three. And the reason is it's really, really much simpler to get a supply chain producing those three, to get factories producing those, to market them, to sell them, to distribute them, etc. And so simplicity like really, really, really pays in product businesses.

22:45Jen Cohen:Totally. If you have the discipline around it. And so like Tesla has one car of the Model Y that sells 1.4 million units a year. And it's the best selling car in the world. They don't have 10 or 15 different models. How many does it sell? 1.4 million units.

23:02Jon McNeill:Still?

23:03Jen Cohen:Still.

23:03Jon McNeill:Now, even with all the... Even with all the stuff going on. The craziness. Even with all the craziness. Of Elon, it's still selling that many?

23:09Jen Cohen:Yeah. It's still the number one single-selling car in the world.

23:12Jon McNeill:Wow. Why do you think that is?

23:14Jen Cohen:Because rather than producing like 10 different SUVs, we figured out the one that would work for the biggest chunk of the market. So we simplified. And then we simplified the production and the parts and the manufacturing process, all that sort of stuff.

23:28Jon McNeill:It's so true. Like, you know, I always notice that the companies, I always say start with one SKU, be your hero product.

23:34Jen Cohen:Yeah.

23:35Jon McNeill:And then like, let that be really successful before you branch out and have a million SKUs.

23:39Jen Cohen:Exactly.

23:40Jon McNeill:Right? Yeah. Because then like, you're always going to be like, you're basically competing and cannibalizing your own business.

23:46Jen Cohen:Your own business. Yeah. And we see this like in the athletic market. All the time. The athleisure market where you've got gazillion SKUs coming out of places like Nike and Adidas, etc. Yeah. And then they go to compete against On, and On's got like 10 SKUs. Right. And On's got a simpler business to run, and it's faster to grow. and it takes less capital, et cetera. So yeah, I'm a huge believer in simplicity. And that's kind of the second step of the algorithm was once you sort of question all the requirements, then you've got to like super simplify the process to deliver against those requirements.

24:19Jon McNeill:So like if you learn this from your mentor, so did you implement this at Tesla? Or did Tesla already have this vision?

24:28Jen Cohen:I think Tesla had this in the culture because Elon, he talks about this, It's like he's a physicist at his core. Physics is all about simplifying the complex down to the utterly simple. And it's called first principles. And so there are first principles in physics. And so he kind of already had this mentality of simplify, simplify, simplify. And I plugged into that because I did too. Like that was completely natural to me.

24:52Jon McNeill:Right. So part of probably why you got along with each other.

24:54Jen Cohen:Yeah. And so I think of why I fit in that culture.

24:58Jon McNeill:Right.

24:58Jen Cohen:Yeah.

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26:38Jon McNeill:Did you get along with all the other people at the company? Did he get along with all the other people. Does he get along with them?

26:46Jen Cohen:I really love that team. It was one of the best teams I've ever worked on. We were doing the best work of our lives together. We're still in touch with each other. I still text back and forth years later with the core team that I was on.

26:59Jon McNeill:Really?

26:59Jen Cohen:And two of my partners in my venture firm now were members of that team.

27:04Jon McNeill:By the way, speaking of your venture firm, then we're going to go back. How big is your venture firm and what are you doing at the end?

27:10Jen Cohen:We do this really unique thing. We invent companies from scratch. So rather than funding entrepreneurs, we actually fund our own ideas. And we get those companies growing. And then we bring a team in to run them. So it's a new model in venture.

27:26Jon McNeill:It's a reverse engineering.

27:27Jen Cohen:It is. You start with a market and you say, I want to attack this market with this product. We're going to build the product, get our first sales. And then we're going to find a world-class team to come in and run it. So it's a venture model that I thought a lot about as an entrepreneur and decided to implement. And there's a handful of us doing this in the world, but not many. It's a pretty unique form of venture.

27:48Jon McNeill:That's amazing. Name a company that you're working on now that you've done.

27:52Jen Cohen:So we've got a cyber company called Cork. We've got the number one AI infrastructure ETF trading on the market. That's called VistaShares. We've got a supply chain company called Atomic. payment company called Zumi. Like we've got a bunch of, we've started, we've got a portfolio of 17 companies. Wow. That we started over the last five years or had a hand in starting.

28:15Jon McNeill:How big is this fund?

28:17Jen Cohen:It's now, it's going to be close to a couple hundred million dollars.

28:21Jon McNeill:Interesting. Wow. Okay. So I just wanted to ask you because I was curious. Yeah. But it sounds like a lot of your background is kind of manufacturing, software. Software for sure. Software, obviously. Like it's kind of like in that wheelhouse. Because all the companies you had before, cars, I guess, now.

28:40Jen Cohen:Yep.

28:41Jon McNeill:Before you did Tesla, did you have a car company, you said?

28:45Jen Cohen:I had a couple that were in the auto company. A couple of car companies? A couple of software companies in the automotive space. I think it came from my granddad owned an auto repair shop, and that was my first job. And I think it just got in my blood somehow. I love cars. So I've had some touch with the car business my whole career.

29:04Jon McNeill:Do you drive a Tesla now?

29:06Jen Cohen:I have a Tesla because I want to always—I sit on the board of General Motors, and I primarily drive their cars. But I have a Tesla because I always want to be driving the best of the competition, and Tesla is the best competitor to GM right now.

29:19Jon McNeill:What kind of GM car are you driving?

29:21Jen Cohen:I'm driving a two. I've got a Cadillac Escalade IQ, which is this beautiful SUV that goes 500 miles. And then I've got a Chevy Silverado EV pickup that also goes close to 500 miles.

29:36Jon McNeill:Wow.

29:36Jen Cohen:I think the pickup might be my favorite right now.

29:38Jon McNeill:Really? Yeah. Wait, where do you live? You live in Nebraska? I live in Colorado. Oh, Colorado. Okay. So, okay. So, let's go back to the Tesla thing. So, basically, the freight, so you, right. So then you guys were getting along on the fact that you guys have the same type of mindset or framework ideas about simplicity over complexity. And then you also had something that I heard you talk about, which I thought was fantastic. And I wrote that down, which was how you kind of weed out the bloat of a company and the people who are underperforming. It reminded me a lot of Animal Farm. You know what I mean?

30:16Jon McNeill:because you make the people make the decision on their own in a very kind of like, not sneaky, but slick way.

30:27Jen Cohen:Simple way. Like, yeah. We try to simplify this crazy thing that happens in companies every year that nobody really likes. It's called performance review season, right? And so like, as a boss, you got to sit down and you got to write a bunch of performance reviews. And there's a bunch of recency bias because you don't remember what that person did all year. You remember what they kind of did in the last few months. so it's not even fair. And everybody kind of hates it. The employees hate it. The bosses hate it. Everybody hates it. So we debated like, how could we like make this actually useful and not a chore for everybody?

30:57Jen Cohen:And what we evolved to was just asking people like, who had the first question, who have you worked with this year? Write it out. And then just put a check mark next to the people that you would want on your team. And that was it. Didn't ask them why. So that was it. So super simple. I write all the people I've worked with. I put a check mark next to people that I would want on my team. And that creates a list of people that are really useful because you see their name mentioned again and again and again. Those are the people that are up for promotion. You see a bunch of people that are not ever mentioned by anybody.

31:29Jen Cohen:Like they clearly are dead weight on teams because nobody wants them on the team. Those are the people that you can then kind of clean out and reload the talent system. And so it was a really simple way to just identify talent and reward that talent. And then also identify kind of the bottom 10 or 15 % that probably needed to move on.

31:47Jon McNeill:That's great. And then how would you get rid of them?

31:50Jen Cohen:We would just tell them, hey, like, this doesn't look like it's the place for you. So thanks, but this isn't going to be a place for your future.

31:59Jon McNeill:And did you do that every single year?

32:01Jen Cohen:Did that constantly.

32:02Jon McNeill:How often?

32:04Jen Cohen:Sometimes a couple times a year. Wow.

32:06Jon McNeill:So you're constantly just weeding out like deadweights.

32:09Jen Cohen:The underperformers. Yeah. Yeah.

32:11Jon McNeill:Deadweights. These are super smart people.

32:13Jen Cohen:Like to get an engineering job at Tesla, they get like probably 40 or 50 ,000 applications for every job now. And so these are super smart people, but for whatever reason, they just didn't, they didn't work on the teams.

32:26Jon McNeill:But by the way, that's not only at Tesla. You can do that with any place.

32:29Jen Cohen:You can do that with any place. Exactly.

32:31Jon McNeill:You can do it with people like my team, you know what I mean? Like with eight people, you know what I mean? Like it doesn't matter. Right. I just think that when you put the onus on someone else to tell you. Yeah. Because they're telling you based on their own experiences. You can't be everywhere. You don't know everything. No. Right. But the best way to know is to ask the people on the front lines. And you talk about that.

32:50Jen Cohen:Yeah.

32:51Jon McNeill:You know, like the fact that if you really want to know what's going on in a company and what's really bad in a company, you go to the people who are in the front lines who are like doing the work.

33:00Jen Cohen:Exactly.

33:01Jon McNeill:You know.

33:01Jen Cohen:Exactly. It's the best hack ever. I learned this from Sam Walton because I read his book, Made in America. And it's basically a book about how he travels from store to store. And the first thing he does when he visits one of his stores, he goes in the back and he talks to the warehouse guy because the warehouse guy knows everything about the store, knows what product is moving, what product isn't moving, knows who's like, who really works up front, who doesn't work. And he got all the information he needed about the store. And then he'd go talk to the store manager and say, hey, look, I know exactly what's going on in your store.

33:29Jen Cohen:I'd be like, how? And then they finally figured out, oh, he's talking to the frontline people who actually know. So I just borrowed that. And I said, like, this is the best hack in the world. Like, I go to the frontline. They're dealing face-to-face with customers. So they know what the customers love. They know what the customers hate because they're getting the first brunt of that. And you just ask them, like, what do we need to fix about our product? And they're like, oh, this, this, and this. He fixes these three things. I don't have any more complaints. It's like, okay, I can make that happen.

33:55Jen Cohen:And I would have this standard question when I went out to the front lines, which is, okay, you have my job. You have all the keys to the company. What's one thing you do today? And I wouldn't get 500 answers. I'd get like five to 10, like just do this. And so literally my teams got used to, I would be out on Fridays, typically on the front lines. And I'd send emails and say, here are the three things we got to work on. And they just got used to it. And then they started to do it because they wanted to be out ahead of me, which is the right motivation.

34:23Jon McNeill:What was the most common trait of all the top performers?

34:26Jen Cohen:A couple of things. One is in that culture, believe it or not, there's this really cool combination of humility and confidence, which kind of sounds weird. But the goals were so high. Like Elon's awesome at setting aspirational goals. So the goals are so high. And you had a choice. Like when you put a goal in front of you, it was like, you're crazy. No. Or most often this humble confidence would come out where you would say, I have no idea how to do that. They came to me and he said, we need to double this company every eight months and there's no marketing budget you can't spend a dollar on marketing and my first reaction was that's insane but then i kind of zipped my lip and i said you know what i don't know how to do that but then the confidence comes in a bit like we're going to figure it out like challenge accepted and that was core to that culture and so when you saw people who were really effective there they had this kind of combination of I don't know how to do that, but I'm game for the challenge.

35:26Jen Cohen:Let's go figure it out. Right. And then they would work like crazy to figure it out. And what I learned was when you set super ambitious goals for people, then they will work to achieve those challenges. And if you never asked, then they never work to achieve them.

35:39Jon McNeill:Absolutely. So because people never know how much they're actually capable of.

35:43Jen Cohen:That's what I kept saying about, yeah, like I kept saying, man, I didn't know I had this inside of me. And he was pulling stuff out of me that I didn't know I had. And I saw it in the people around me and the teams that work for me too, that people were given what, they were able to accomplish much more than they thought they could. Right.

35:59Jon McNeill:Yeah. Because you're constantly challenging them to push themselves. Yeah, exactly. Because people, like, sometimes people don't see, they don't know unless they know, unless they do it.

36:08Jen Cohen:Unless they've been challenged, yeah. Right.

36:10Jon McNeill:And then the more they do it, they have more confidence in doing a harder thing and more and more and more.

36:15Jen Cohen:Yeah, exactly.

36:15Jon McNeill:How are you able to, like, manage Elon's expectations? Like, because he's like a...

36:20Jen Cohen:I don't think you can manage these expectations. We just had to like really work hard to deliver against those expectations because the expectations are reasonable. Like I used to be a founder too. So I had been on the other side of this and it was really setting high goals for people and holding them accountable to achieve them. And so I felt like now that I'm on the other side in the receiving end, I had to be doing the same thing.

36:42Jon McNeill:Right. So I was going to say like, because, you know, if you're going to ask other people to like do exceptionally hard work, you have to, you have, it comes it basically it falls from the top first right so because i i i've heard that he like sleeps in the office for like days on end is that true he does like we would have problems in the

37:00Jen Cohen:factory and we would be sleeping on the factory for for weeks trying to figure out like how to solve the problem so it wasn't like he was dumping the problem in our laps and and uh taking off he was in the trenches with us and that that then brings a lot of conviction that you we ought to 100 did you do that too oh 100 yeah you slept at the office oh yeah for how long

37:20Jon McNeill:Like, didn't go home for how long? Days?

37:22Jen Cohen:A couple weeks. Well, I mean, I would go home. Yeah. But it might be two or three nights in a row and go home. And then...

37:30Jon McNeill:So, wait, wait, wait. You go home for... You stay at the office for a couple nights? Two or three nights? And then you go home after a few nights? Yeah. And then what? Like, just come home and come back to the office and then sleep again for a few nights?

37:40Jen Cohen:Basically because the company was, like, in survival mode. And so if we didn't solve these problems, we're going bankrupt. Oh, wow. And so, like, it was dire straits. and I don't know if that happens now as much, but in that era, like we were almost bankrupt a lot and the press was talking about it. I totally remember. And they weren't wrong. We were really fragile.

37:59Jon McNeill:Wow. So then like, how do you, like, if you don't mind me asking, you could tell me to shut up, but then how do you get compensated as a COO for something like that, where you're like literally like sleeping on the floor of the plant for days on end, for weeks on end? Like, cause you're not there anymore, right? Like I know you have stock probably, but like you you must have felt like you were like a part like there must have been a feeling even of like being on a team and yeah you know like not letting i mean at the end of the day how are people being compensating for that like are you i think the way the the compensation comes as a

38:32Jen Cohen:leader the compensation comes from looking around at the team and the people that are involved so there are literally like 7 000 people working in that factory on a per shift and if we didn't get this right, they'd be out at work. And that was my motivation. My motivation was I would, I'm working beside these people. I'm looking in their eyes. And that was motivation and compensation enough for me. Like we're not going out of business. Uh, you're going to have, be able to buy groceries, fund your kids education, buy a house, et cetera, if we get this right. And that's compensation enough for me.

39:01Jon McNeill:Because you were only, you were there for four years. That wasn't, that's not a lifetime. It's a long time, but it's not a lifetime. And then you went, you moved on to Lyft.

39:09Jen Cohen:Yeah.

39:10Jon McNeill:Did, so were you still working at Tesla when Lyft poached you or how did that whole thing happen?

39:16Jen Cohen:So I had, like Elon and I had this conversation and I told him I was going to leave and give him months of time to do a transition. And during that, somehow the investors in Lyft found out about that. And so they reached out to me and said, hey, look, we want to talk to you about taking Lyft public, which normally I just wouldn't return the call. But I'd never taken one of my companies public before I sold all six of mine to public companies.

39:42Jon McNeill:Got it. Okay.

39:43Jen Cohen:And it was something that I really wanted to, like, it's a box I wanted to check. I wanted to have that experience of taking a company public.

39:48Jon McNeill:But wait, hold on. Why were you talking to Elon about, Elon, about leaving?

39:53Jen Cohen:I had, like, Walter Isaacson talks about this in his book a bit, where in this chapter at Tesla, there was a chapter where Elon was really, really struggling with mental health issues and my job went from helping to run tesla to really helping him with mental health issues for which i am not equipped i just am not trained i don't have the skills you know it's burying me because i just was trying to help but i didn't have the skill set to help help in what way though just help get him through a really tough time uh and like it's a friend yeah almost as a friend as a friend rather than a business colleague just as a friend And so Walter has a scene in his book where I'm laying on the floor underneath the conference room table beside Elon trying to help get him on an earnings call.

40:42Jen Cohen:And at that point, I just realized, man, this is not what I'm equipped to do. And so Elon and I had that conversation. I said, I love you and I love this business, but I'm not equipped to do this. And it's burying me. I'm going to go do something else. And that was really the core of that conversation.

40:58Jon McNeill:Wow. So are you guys friends anymore?

41:01Jen Cohen:We're friendly, I would say, and we're like in touch every once in a while now. And I'm glad he's in a much healthier place now.

41:08Jon McNeill:He is? Yeah, he is. Wow. Yeah. Okay, so then you wanted to, so basically you wanted to leave the place. I did. Yeah.

41:15Jen Cohen:I did.

41:15Jon McNeill:So, because you had a, did you have a family? I did. Yeah. And so what did they think of your, you probably were working, it sounds to me, like 20.

41:24Jen Cohen:I was working like a madman. 24 hours a day. They were relieved. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

41:29Jon McNeill:And so that, okay, so you wanted to leave. So then people kind of heard about it a little bit.

41:34Jen Cohen:Yeah, somehow like it leaked out. And I don't know how it leaked out, but it somehow leaked out. And so then what?

41:39Jon McNeill:Okay, so now walk me through what happened.

41:41Jen Cohen:So then I agreed to join Lyft. No, no, no.

41:45Jon McNeill:So you said, how did that happen?

41:46Jen Cohen:So I got a call from Ben Horowitz at Andreessen Horowitz. He's an early investor in Lyft. He said, I want to talk to you.

41:53Jon McNeill:Isn't he also an investor in Tesla?

41:55Jen Cohen:I don't think, no, they weren't. the venture firm wasn't investors in Tesla, but it's a pretty small world. And he said, hey, I want to talk to you because Tesla never made really a quarter until you got there. And then they've made a lot of quarters in a row. And so we sat down and he said, hey, look, I need your help getting Lyft public. And I said, you don't know this, but you're pressing a button that you probably didn't know you're pressing, but I haven't taken one of my companies public. I'd love to have that experience. So I joined Lyft as COO. They have two founders. So I came in as COO And we doubled the revenue, doubled the market share, and got the company public.

42:28Jon McNeill:And then that was also around the time that Uber was being beaten up, right? Was it the sexual harassment stuff?

42:36Jen Cohen:Yeah, I arrived at Lyft at just the right time because the delete Uber movement was well underway. Right. And so it made it much easier than it would have been to double share and double sales because we had this opening where a competitor was really stumbling badly and we were able to come in and scoop up a bunch of market share as a result.

42:56Jon McNeill:What's really, why is Lyft, I mean, I don't know if you know this now, maybe you do, but by the way, isn't Lyft and Uber now merged?

43:04Jen Cohen:No, they're still competing.

43:05Jon McNeill:They're still competing?

43:06Jen Cohen:Yeah, still competing, two separate public companies.

43:09Jon McNeill:Because I'm going to tell you, I always use Lyft.

43:12Jen Cohen:Love it. Why?

43:13Jon McNeill:Okay, I'm going to tell you why. Number one, it's always a little bit cheaper.

43:16Jen Cohen:Yep.

43:17Jon McNeill:And like just a little bit.

43:18Jen Cohen:Yeah.

43:19Jon McNeill:And because it's the underdog a little bit. Yeah, exactly. And I just, I find it to be people a little bit more friendly sometimes. They're a little more, it's more of like the quirky, like quirky young sister.

43:34Jen Cohen:Exactly. And that's the brand positioning. We wanted it to be like against the Darth Vader, we were going to be the quirky young sister. Really? Yeah, totally. And position the brand that way. So it's more friendly, more quirky, more fun, and just a little bit less expensive. And so if that was enough. Just a little bit. Exactly. That was enough to tip the scales our way.

43:53Jon McNeill:But wait, but now Uber is like dominating though again. Yes. So at the time, so how long were you at Lyft for?

44:00Jen Cohen:Just about two years, just a little under two years.

44:03Jon McNeill:Okay. And then what happened? So you said they IPO, I was going to say YPO. They IPO'd.

44:09Jen Cohen:They IPO'd and I stayed. There's what's called a lockup after an IPO where all the insiders, including investors, can't sell for like six months. So I stayed for the lockup. And then once the lockup expired, I wanted to go start my own firm because I'd been dying to do this for like five years. So that's when I left to go do my own thing.

44:27Jon McNeill:Tell me how you were able to then catapult Lyft's business, just how you did with Tesla.

44:33Jen Cohen:So this is another like simplification. So I sat down with my team, all who had been there for a long time. And I said, like, there's a really simple question i have for you which is where do we make our money it can't be in like five dollar rides uh that are two minutes long and it's really really smart savvy guy on my team his name's david bagga and david said we make our money in two places 80 of the cash flow comes from airport rides and rides to the doctor and so we tested that it was like if that's where the prop this is called a profit pool if that's where the profit pool is we got to go hard after that and it became apparent at this time that uber didn't have that insight so we went hard after airport rides which are corporate and hard after health care rides which really really matter to people like there are people there there are people that really suffer from chronic disease like kidney disease they have to go get dialysis like several times a week and they have to have a ride to and from because once you get dialysis you can't like drive a car so uh it turns out their health insurance pays for those rides.

45:36Jen Cohen:And so we were able to cut deals with health insurers, with healthcare providers, and with businesses to give those two rides, and that helped us double revenue. And it was just that simplification, that simple insight, asking like, where do we make our money?

45:50Jon McNeill:That's really smart.

45:52Jen Cohen:Well, it looks at it in retrospect. What I was dumbfounded by was nobody had asked that question before. I'm like, so there were a lot of people in the business. Nobody asked that question before. There were a lot of people that didn't know that in the business, but luckily David Baggett did know that. And he pointed our team in the right direction.

46:10Jon McNeill:So where did you add value?

46:12Jen Cohen:So it was then, well, it was asking that question and then pointing the business at those two things.

46:19Jon McNeill:So that was your idea, though, to do that?

46:21Jen Cohen:Well, I would say that's the team's idea. That's me asking the question. They come up with the answer. And so now we're all going to implement it together.

46:27Jon McNeill:Well, no, but you ask the question, they're going to be like, shit, I don't know. And then they went down a rabbit hole, hopefully, to find it.

46:32Jen Cohen:Luckily, it wasn't the shit I don't know. It was like, no, here's where we make the money. Okay, if this is where we make the money, then this is where we're going to point all of our resources.

46:41Jon McNeill:Do you know what I find so interesting? You know, my grandmother would always say common sense isn't so common.

46:47Jen Cohen:Right.

46:47Jon McNeill:And what I've noticed is in both scenarios in Tesla with like, why is nobody getting follow-up calls when they're doing their drive? Their test drives. Their test drives. Duh. Duh. That's how you're going to sell a freaking car. And then at Lyft, it's like, where are the most expensive rides? And like, who is giving the most expensive? Like, where are those rides? Like, we're not making money off$5 rides. We're making money off of these hospital rides.

47:13Jen Cohen:And the$100 trips to the airport. Yeah.

47:16Jon McNeill:And the$100 trips to the airport. Like, focus our attention on the more expensive. Totally. Right? Like, I always talk about the fact that also that, like, you work just as hard as having, you know, whatever. Like when you have like when I when you do a partnership that's a million dollars versus 20 bucks. Yeah. You're still working. The amount of work is usually the same.

47:38Jen Cohen:That's a great example. Exactly. You know. The amount of work is the same. And so why not apply that work to the profit pool? Super simple.

47:45Jon McNeill:Exactly. Yeah. It's like this is like literally like things that people just are not focusing on.

47:50Jen Cohen:Right.

47:51Jon McNeill:Give me another one.

47:53Jen Cohen:I think it happens in a lot of businesses. Like at Lululemon, when I asked the question, where do we make our money?

47:59Jon McNeill:Yeah.

47:59Jen Cohen:Lululemon has historically made their money in bottoms, not tops. And so it's the pant wall. That's where they make their money.

48:07Jon McNeill:Yeah.

48:07Jen Cohen:So then you'd ask the question, okay, why do we have all the rest of this extraneous stuff going on then? Because it's just diluting profitability to your point. And it's like the$20 deal versus the$1 ,000 deal. So like this happens all over businesses because businesses get complex over time and nobody comes along. It's like a garden that gets weeds and nobody comes along to weed the garden. And I feel like my job is come weed the garden. Like, let's figure out which of these plants matter and let's water the heck out of them and let's whack the heck out of everything else.

48:37Jon McNeill:You know what, though? This is so true. And I hope anybody who's doing business or interested in business is listening to this. Because if you really think about it, right? Lululemon is a great example. Again, because at the beginning, when Lululemon started, they were dominating, right? Because, yeah, they were known for their pants. because they made girls' butts look better or whatever. Right? And that would be the first thing you see when you go into a Lululemon. It would be the sores would be a little smaller and the pants would be on the sides and whatever else. It'd be like the first focal place that your eyes look.

49:10Jon McNeill:You go into a Lululemon now, there's so much, as I would say, drek, it's a Hebrew word. There's so much noise and busyness in there with all the bags and the accessories and the bras and 97 different like levels of tank tops, like crops and then quarters and this. And then I'm like, where the hell are the pants? And the pants are in the back, back, back. You've got to walk through all this junk and it's like a small wall versus like make more pants.

49:43Jen Cohen:Well, hopefully you'll like walk into a Lulu like I've been in two today so far.

49:47Jon McNeill:Yeah, okay.

49:47Jen Cohen:Because this is part of my spending time on the front lines. I want to be a useful board member. So I go to stores.

49:51Jon McNeill:Yeah.

49:52Jen Cohen:And we've got a new team running North America, and in literally weeks, they have simplified the store, simplified the story, simplified the product lineup so that it's focusing on a few things versus a lot of things.

50:05Jon McNeill:What are they focusing on now?

50:06Jen Cohen:So they're focusing on the three things that Lulu is known for, yoga, train, and run. And so you should walk in and you should see train, run, yoga, and the pants are highlighted, and there's not a bunch of dreck.

50:20Jon McNeill:Yeah, dreck. Thank you. I mean, that's the way I see it, right? Because what were they focusing on for a bunch of years?

50:27Jen Cohen:Well, sometimes you lose your way and you say, I've got to have casual clothes. Well, then you're competing with a lot of people that are not in your core. And you said it in the core, it was about workout clothes that made her look beautiful. And that was the mantra. When I started at Lulu, the mantra was, we exist to make her silhouette look beautiful.

50:47Jon McNeill:I didn't say that. You said that. I said the butt looked good. Yeah.

50:50Jen Cohen:Well, we had a little bit more dressed up way of saying it or have. And now they're getting back to that. They're like, we exist to make all shapes and sizes of her body look beautiful. That's what we do. And we do that with a limited set of skews, not a gazillion skews.

51:04Jon McNeill:But the other problem with Lululemon is at the beginning, they had much better quality. Their quality has went down over the years.

51:10Jen Cohen:It's now like, I have people say this to me all the time. Like the quality is so good at Lululemon. Like I'm wearing stuff that's like five years old or six years old. And I've tried Aloe. I've tried Vori. And the stuff wears out. Oh, yeah. Aloe is terrible. Exactly. Like, so that's music to my ears because we really have put a big emphasis on quality too.

51:29Jon McNeill:See, I don't know. I mean, I find that when Lululemon just start, like right when they're just, kind of just starting 20 years ago yeah they had great their quality was it was better i found it

51:39Jen Cohen:to be better well i think now you like give it or give it a run really i know that i agree the aloe

51:44Jon McNeill:stuff is junk i mean it's like basically like it's it's basically like the most the cheapest it's almost disposable it is i was gonna say it's like what do you call fast fashion exactly and but they're charging massive prices yeah and in fact they want to be like uh an elevated brand now they want to be like a luxury brand right which i'm like they have nice styles but like that stuff does not yeah it's not great cal it's not great quality yeah so how are lululemon zembers now are

52:11Jen Cohen:they still good now we're uh we're really in the midst of a real turnaround in north america they're great in china great in europe but we've really had to renew our focus in north america and the team's doing that so it's it's working so far what about styles are they going to like change

52:26Jon McNeill:the styles and kind of like be a little bit more fashion forward or i think like or that's not it's not what the core you want to stay with the core of what i think the core of what they do is is

52:36Jen Cohen:they stay focused on making a few products just absolutely killer and that can mean it's more beautiful and over time they took out some piping and some zippers and things like that that we want to add back in because it adds to the beauty of the product well the other thing that lula lem

52:51Jon McNeill:just to kind of not to like i know you're not like chip wilson but yeah um is he still on the Is he still like involved? They kicked him out, right? For all the other...

52:58Jen Cohen:Before I got on the board, yeah. So that was a chapter before I got there.

53:01Jon McNeill:That was a chapter. Wouldn't they kick him out of there again?

53:03Jen Cohen:It was the, it was, I think, the comments that he made about, there are certain people that shouldn't be wearing my clothes. I know, I remember that.

53:12Jon McNeill:And they kicked him out. But how was it? Two years ago?

53:14Jen Cohen:That was almost 10 years ago. 10?

53:16Jon McNeill:Yeah. My God.

53:17Jen Cohen:Yeah.

53:17Jon McNeill:God, I'm in like a black hole of time. Good. Make time go slow. Yeah, right? Yeah. But what I was going to say about the Lululemon is, this is what you guys do all the time. Not you, because I know you're on the board, but you guys take things out that are really popular and then to never be seen again. When things are doing really well, you'll never find them again. So many of the sports bras that I like, gone. Completely gone. And they've been replaced by things that are much less adequate. Why?

53:49Jen Cohen:I will take that feedback. I'll go find out for you. No, would you let me know? I haven't been in the bra market, so I've got to go figure it out.

53:54Jon McNeill:Okay, well, I'm going to tell you why, okay? I'm going to tell you this, and then you can do whatever you want with the information.

53:59Jen Cohen:This is good feedback. This is a feedback loop that we're doing right now. You're giving me feedback, then I then get to take back to the team.

54:04Jon McNeill:Well, you can, and I want to get a free bra from it, but I'm going to tell you what they have. It's a good consulting fee. I think so. It's very cheap for you. Yes. Very cost-effective for Lululemon. They would make a bra that had pockets. It would have two layers. It would be material, and then room, and then the material. So I could put my key. I could put my credit card. I could put like my dollar bill. I could put stuff in there. Everyone loved this bra. Everybody loved the bra. And it was like really good support. Yeah. Gone. Bra, totally gone.

54:35Jen Cohen:I'll find out what happened.

54:35Jon McNeill:And now they have flimsy bras. Either they have the bras that like you can't like run in them because they're too like flimsy. Or they have these like matronly like granny bras that like are like from here to here. I'm like, I'm not wearing either one. Where is this other bra? And so, and they're like, and the people I would ask at the stores would be like, yeah, I know, they always do this. It's like, they keep on like discontinuing the most popular things.

55:01Jen Cohen:I will find out for you what happened.

55:03Jon McNeill:Can you?

55:03Jen Cohen:I can.

55:04Jon McNeill:Perfect. I know who to ask. Okay, good. I know you do. You do know who to ask. Who is the CEO now?

55:09Jen Cohen:So we have co-CEOs while we're doing a full search for a CEO. Oh, okay.

55:14Jon McNeill:So you are doing a full search. Yeah, we are. When did you guys, who was the last CEO?

55:19Jen Cohen:Calvin McDonald was the last CEO. Until when? Until the end of January.

55:23Jon McNeill:Oh, like just now?

55:24Jen Cohen:Just now, yeah. How long was he there? He was five years, and he tripled the business, and he did a fantastic job. Then where did he go? He went to a beauty—he came from Sephora. He built up Sephora, came to Lulu, and then now he's at a beauty conglomerate called Wella.

55:41Jon McNeill:Oh, I know Wella, of course.

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57:36Jon McNeill:That's fatty15.com slash habits, code habits. And you can find the link in the show notes. Now let's get back to the episode.

57:52Jon McNeill:So now let's get back to the days of Lyft for a second and Uber, the whole thing. So then here you are, you kind of like, basically, you made the business go from what to what at Lyft.

58:04Jen Cohen:So I forget what the revenues were, but it was somewhere in the order of going from$5 billion in gross revenue to$10 billion, something like that, order of magnitude.

58:16Jon McNeill:Okay, so then, so what happens now? What year? This is 2018-ish?

58:21Jen Cohen:2018-2019. Okay. Yeah.

58:24Jon McNeill:So how did Uber then, again, catapult them? Like if you did all these good things for Lyft and made it more quirky, it was a little bit less expensive. Yeah. Then why are more people not using it and now everyone only uses Uber?

58:42Jen Cohen:Because Uber, I think, Uber also wasn't resting on their laurels. And they have a really good CEO. Now they do. Yeah, and Dara. And a really good president. How long has he been there? He's been there. He got there about 2018-ish. Oh, around when you were. 2017, 2018. So he's been there eight years. And they didn't rest on their laurels. They saw this opportunity in food.

59:08Jon McNeill:Yeah, Uber Eats.

59:08Jen Cohen:And they said, okay, we've already recruited a driver. Driver's not busy all day long, especially in the middle of the day and after rush hour. And that sounds like lunch and dinner. So let's get in the food business. And the founders of Lyft were not, and still haven't to this day, they hated the food business. They weren't attracted to it. And so Uber leapfrogged them because they could use their drivers twice rather than once, essentially. Or in two businesses rather than one. And that completely changes the economics of the business.

59:40Jon McNeill:And Lyft just refused to do it?

59:41Jen Cohen:Yeah, the mantra was, we don't want our cars smelling like Chinese food. Well, that's not really how it works. But it's kind of a tragedy because Lyft missed this window. And a lot of us on the team disagreed with the founders, which is why basically the whole management team left. And so Uber took advantage of that too.

59:59Jon McNeill:And so where are they now?

1:00:00Jen Cohen:Kind of spread all over the place, doing amazing stuff. In terms of the leaders, Lyft now is back to half the market share it used to have.

1:00:08Jon McNeill:Half the market share.

1:00:09Jen Cohen:Yeah.

1:00:10Jon McNeill:What do you think they can do to kind of like, if you had to be back at Lyft, if they brought you back and said -

1:00:15Jen Cohen:I don't know now, because it'd be very hard to enter the food business because it's super crowded now. It's not just Uber Eats, it's DoorDash, Grub, et cetera.

1:00:23Jon McNeill:Postmates is a million.

1:00:24Jen Cohen:Yeah, exactly. So you've got a bunch of, so I haven't thought about that, but I think it'd be a tough job. Would you take it? No, no. I'm much more excited about what's going on in AI and technology and other places of the business, but not that.

1:00:37Jon McNeill:What do you think of AI? Like ChapGPT, Claw, Gemini?

1:00:41Jen Cohen:I think, well, in that particular business, like the biggest AI problem, maybe the toughest AI problem is turning a car into a robot. And that's what I think is going to come eat the lunch of Rideshare. Because you see it like even here in LA, Waymo is like a really superb experience. Oh, yeah. And I think that's the future of Rideshare is it's going to be robotic.

1:01:01Jon McNeill:So when do you think Waze is going to take over all Rideshare, like Uber and Lyft?

1:01:06Jen Cohen:I think they are systematically just growing their fleet over time. And they don't have a demand problem because they have more demand than they know what to do with. And so they're a safety-first company, and they're really focused around safety. And right now, the technology is good as long as it's not raining or snowing. And so you see them going across this southern belt of the U.S., the southern smile. But eventually, they'll figure that out, and they'll be in the northern cities too. And so I think they're just being very careful, very systematic, and making sure their cars are super safe.

1:01:37Jen Cohen:Because they know that as soon as there's a major accident, it's going to be a big blocker in the business. So they're just, I think, being very patient and playing the long game.

1:01:47Jon McNeill:So do you think other companies are going to come on board pretty soon?

1:01:51Jen Cohen:I think it's a really hard technical problem to solve. So I don't think there's going to be a lot of companies in this space. Like they kind of own it today. and there's really nobody that can challenge them because their technology is so much better than everybody else's.

1:02:05Jon McNeill:How many Weymouths are there even?

1:02:07Jen Cohen:There's like 3 ,000 on the road today, so not that many.

1:02:09Jon McNeill:Not that many.

1:02:10Jen Cohen:There are 300 million cars in the U.S., so we're talking like right now a drop in the bucket.

1:02:14Jon McNeill:I'm even surprised that there's not more Ubers and Lyfts like other companies that are competitive with them.

1:02:19Jen Cohen:Right, because that market, when you have to pay a driver, it's relatively expensive, and so it's less expensive to drive your own car. So people choose 99 times out of 100, drive their own car. But once you don't have to pay a driver and the car's a robot, then you open up a much bigger market. And so that's what I think we're going to see.

1:02:38Jon McNeill:How about other places with the AI? Like just in terms of like Claude, Chat, like I was saying, just like basic, like which ones do you like the best?

1:02:45Jen Cohen:I use Claude the most probably. Me too.

1:02:48Jon McNeill:For what? What do you use it for?

1:02:50Jen Cohen:I use it for coding. Really? Yeah. So like if we have a company idea, you can literally prototype a company using Cloud. You can prototype the product. You can start to test the product. So I use Cloud a lot and I use Gemini. I use ChatGPT. I kind of use them all because I like to compare them. But for tools that we actually use in business building, we're mostly using Cloud.

1:03:10Jon McNeill:Because it changes so quickly.

1:03:12Jen Cohen:It does change like every month. It's unbelievable.

1:03:15Jon McNeill:It's really unbelievable. So is there like, what do you use Gemini for specifically? What would you use ChatGPT for? Or what would you use? I know for Claude, you said you would use it for prototyping.

1:03:25Jen Cohen:Yeah. So I use, Gemini has replaced search for me. So I use Gemini for search. Research, like if I want to research an industry, where before I would ask an analyst, hey, let's build a whole picture of this industry. How big is it? Who are the competitors? What's the market share? What are the economics? For that kind of research, I use ChatGPT now. And it does an unbelievable job. and then once we have those answers and want to build a company then we use clod so i kind of have three different use cases for each of those and they're all incredible tools so it made us it takes us half of the people and half the capital to start a company now than it

1:04:04Jon McNeill:did 18 months ago it's crazy right how are these like like you know people are sending me these things all the time with like you know this person's not real that person's not real this is like, how are they creating people? Like there's like actual like accounts like who are growing their Instagram pages and like social media pages fast. They're like beautiful girls or really thoughtful men. And they're like talking as like thought leaders. I think they're real. I'm like, okay, I'll follow them. I'm like, and then my friend's like, oh, that was not real. That was not real. I'm like, how are they doing this?

1:04:39Jon McNeill:Like, what are they using? Are they using Claude? Are they using ChatGPT?

1:04:42Jen Cohen:They're probably using a combo. Yeah, like there's - How? Well, basically, if you go back to the origin of the AI that we have today, it's a prediction model. And it predicts what words come next. And words can be turned into numbers, and that's how the math works. And so you can get really predictive about words that turn next. And pictures are also numbers. Pictures are made up of these tiny little specks called pixels. And you can understand, the AI can understand which pixels ought to go together based on patterns it's seen. And so it can create images and it can create text. And you can bring those together.

1:05:18Jen Cohen:And that's like we had bots several years ago that would create fake accounts and create fake followers and all this stuff. Now this is just a souped up version of bots that you're describing because the AI can create the context. It can create the content and it can create the visuals. And so it's wild to see. and I think AI can spot other false AIs. So like I have this little tool that I've created that it senses whether this was AI generated or whether this is real, but it's going to get better over time and it's going to be harder to do.

1:05:54Jon McNeill:Wow. Yeah. So who's actually controlling it? Like who's creating? There has to be a human being who's actually directing the AI. Yeah, for sure. It doesn't create itself. Right, because AI is only as good as your prompts. That's what I've noticed. Yep, that's right. And if you're a shitty prompter like I am, I'm getting like very basic information. So then who is the expert like in the world that are able to create these?

1:06:16Jen Cohen:There are experts like that are doing, they're doing really productive things and kind of just unproductive things too. But like there are marketers that really understand how to use these tools and they're doing incredible things. And we're lucky to have some of them, Lulu and GM and some of the companies I'm involved with. And they've just made marketing so much more productive because you can get the right answer, the right message in front of the right person. person with high, high accuracy. And that then leads to product interest and potentially a purchase.

1:06:45Jon McNeill:And it's amazing. It is amazing.

1:06:47Jen Cohen:It's a fun time to be alive.

1:06:48Jon McNeill:It is. It's a really fun time to be alive. I mean, but like, so jobs will be like kind of depleted, but then again. They'll be changed.

1:06:54Jen Cohen:Like I think humans are really good at seeing the job disruption.

1:06:58Jon McNeill:Yeah.

1:06:58Jen Cohen:But we're not good at seeing the jobs that get created on the other side. Largely because it's almost impossible to see that. But, so if we were talking about, if we were talking to each other 120 years ago, it wasn't that long ago, six out of eight people worked in agriculture. And then this thing came along called the tractor. And there were a bunch of doomsayers saying, oh my God, like six out of eight people are going to be unemployed. The country's going to implode. Well, it turned out there were a bunch of jobs that got created in that industrial revolution, like car factories and other things that people went and did different jobs.

1:07:29Jen Cohen:We're not good at seeing that. We're good at the doom and gloom, but we're not good at seeing what's on the other side.

1:07:33Jon McNeill:Exactly.

1:07:34Jen Cohen:And every technical revolution in history has led to an expansion in GDP. So do we believe this is going to be the first one? I don't. I think this is going to lead to expansion of jobs and expansion of wealth, but we just can't see the other side yet.

1:07:47Jon McNeill:Right. We don't know what we don't know, right? We don't know what we don't know. That's the other issue, right? Yeah.

1:07:52Jen Cohen:Yep.

1:07:52Jon McNeill:I mean, so that's what you're really focusing, you're focusing really on your venture fund, basically creating, you're not even like, like it's just, you're creating real, like real companies, real companies, solving real problems

1:08:04Jen Cohen:in the real world.

1:08:05Jon McNeill:And then actually, what are some other things that you're noticing like in the marketplace?

1:08:09Jen Cohen:I think that's, we want to be solving like real problems in the real world that have kind of a physical aspect to them and make that physical process better because we know that's going to be protected in the end from an AI revolution.

1:08:26Jon McNeill:Wow. So, of course, AI. Okay, so let me ask you a couple other questions about frameworks from your book, right? Okay. Because I think that this is a very good book for anybody who's looking or who is an entrepreneur, who's growing a business. Also, what I find interesting, and we can talk about this actually, is that, you know, to get a company from zero to, let's say, a hundred million is very different than scaling it from a hundred to a billion. Exactly. Right? What are some of the things that people, like, what are some of the things that people get wrong when they're trying to scale a business?

1:08:55Jen Cohen:I think when you're scaling from zero, it's the hardest chapter of a business because Most hard, most difficult. Totally. it's it's like terribly hard like i'll i teach in some business schools and students will come up and say i want to be an entrepreneur and i'll say why it's not the hardest thing ever to take something from zero to get your first million or five million in sales and so we we do work a lot on what we call product market fit and that is do you can you get a product that is so attractive that people rave about it and if they rave about it then you don't have to spend marketing dollars and that is that's a signal that you're onto something and so we spend a ton of time on the product and like polishing it and making it making it super attractive to our target and so that that says you got to know your target and you got to know what they want and you got to deliver against that and that tends to take a lot of work it's another form of simplification that's really really important to get right i was with uh steve jobs's chief of staff from way back and I said give me an example like how you guys simplified product and he said oh all the work happens up front I said what do you mean he said like that's the hardest thing you have to get in a room you got to figure out what you're going to make and why you're going to make it and it's got to be really simple I said give me an example he said okay get in the wayback machine we made the iPod I said yeah he said Steve and I got in a room he said I was in charge of product for the iPod we got in a room and said what has to be true about this product and at the time all the music players didn't have many songs and they were really janky and clunky so they said we emerged and said we want our music player to have a thousand songs and it only takes four seconds to find a song that was the total product definition they came to the engineers and the engineers like we don't know how to do that there's no there's no hard drive that'll hold a thousand songs and there's no software that can find it in four seconds we said exactly that's what we're going to invent and we find the same thing in our products if you're really really really simple about the two things that matter or the three things that matter, then you can focus yourself on building that.

1:10:50Jen Cohen:And your first signal is going to be people rave about it. And if they don't rave about it, then you haven't gotten those two or three things right. You got to go back to the drawing board.

1:10:57Jon McNeill:Right. So if people like, what if you've heard, like, how about all those times that there's a really great product, but really terrible marketing? Yeah. It does happen all the

1:11:05Jen Cohen:time. You're absolutely right. Like I noticed this, like, it's not always the best product that wins.

1:11:09Jon McNeill:No, it's not.

1:11:10Jen Cohen:It's the best Salesforce that wins, the best marketing team that wins. And so we realized, okay, these two things have to be true. You have to have a killer product, but you also have a killer go-to-market because that wins. And there's a bunch of examples in tech. I won't name names, but I think everybody listening to this can name names of tech products that are not the best, but they won somehow. And usually that's because they had an unbelievable go-to-market.

1:11:32Jon McNeill:Well, no, give us an example of something because this is what you do for a living.

1:11:35Jen Cohen:So let's take Microsoft. Yeah. Microsoft did not have the best operating system, did not have the best spreadsheet. It used to be something called Lotus 123. Did not have the best presentation platform, the best word processor. But the amazing thing that Bill Gates had beside him was a guy named Steve Ballmer who could sell ice to Eskimos. The guy's unbelievable. And he built a sales force of unbelievably talented and capable people. And so Microsoft's a great example of not having the best product, but winning market share like crazy. They don't they don't have the best cloud. Amazon does, but Azure's doing just fine.

1:12:09Jen Cohen:They don't have the best office suite. You could argue Google does, but Microsoft's enterprise Salesforce crushes Google's enterprise Salesforce. And so oftentimes, like, you've got to have kill or go to market to actually win. Absolutely. And so we concentrate on both of those things.

1:12:24Jon McNeill:So really what I'm gathering is that the most important skill to scale and to grow a business is sales.

1:12:32Jen Cohen:Is to be able to sell. You've eventually got to be able to sell your product.

1:12:34Jon McNeill:At the end of the day, you can say anything you want about product being wonderful and this being great and this being wonderful. At the end of the day, if you don't have a sales team that can sell, you're in big trouble.

1:12:44Jen Cohen:It's true. It really is both and. It's not either or. You've got to have both great product and a great go-to-market.

1:12:50Jon McNeill:Or what you just said yourself is you can have a mediocre product and still win.

1:12:54Jen Cohen:You can win. If your competitors stink at go-to-market, you can win.

1:12:58Jon McNeill:I know a lot of things that I'm like, wow, that's like, I found this like, like nothing product that's so much more like dominating, but yet like they have no money to market. So nobody knows about it.

1:13:10Jen Cohen:Nobody knows about it.

1:13:10Jon McNeill:Right.

1:13:11Jen Cohen:Yeah.

1:13:11Jon McNeill:And look, you can look at all the things on social media, TikTok shop, crap, like stuff from China that costs four and a half cents that like you have a million people just like pushing this shit. Like all these like moms who are really good salespeople, young girl, whatever it is, they're selling millions and millions of shots, like nothing like tchotchkes, whatever. You get it. You're like, what the hell is this? But they're selling them because how about the supplement business? Like, again, it's about having a dominating sales force. Yeah.

1:13:41Jen Cohen:It makes up for a lot.

1:13:42Jon McNeill:You don't have to have anything else. Like you just, that's why when people say, oh, have it, you know, really work on the product, product, product, really?

1:13:50Jen Cohen:I believe the product's got to be good because eventually your customer figures it out.

1:13:53Jon McNeill:No, what I think that happens is people will buy it once and then they'll never buy it again. Like you just said,

1:13:58Jen Cohen:you just made that point about aloe.

1:14:01Jon McNeill:But no, I made that point about aloe, but aloe is dominating the market.

1:14:05Jen Cohen:But they're really good at selling. But if you don't have the product, eventually, like as you said, People buy it once and then they don't come back. And if they don't come back, you don't have a business.

1:14:14Jon McNeill:True.

1:14:14Jen Cohen:So that's why I say you got to have both.

1:14:16Jon McNeill:But listen, fashion is a different animal. Because aloe has not the greatest quality, but their aesthetics are really nice. They've got great style, aesthetics. So it's like you said, fast fashion. Like a, what do you call it? Like a Zara. Fashion Nova or like Zara. Because people will keep on buying it because it looks good. And it's like athletic leisure is super popular. It's comfortable. right so that's why but in anything else if the product like that's why you'll keep on buying that but in anything else you'll buy it once and if it's really shitty or not like a food or supplements is a hard one because you only don't taste the supplement no and you can't tell you

1:14:54Jen Cohen:can't like run a test on your body to figure out if it's really working no but you can run a lab

1:14:57Jon McNeill:test you can take that stuff to a lab and you know before you got here i was with uh ken right at we're talking about all the uh supplement stuff and it's if you take some of this stuff to the labs and you'll see whatever they're like, like they're telling you, oh, it has this in it, that in it. You'll take it and it's like zero of the ingredient that they tell you. Like, you know how often that happens?

1:15:19Jen Cohen:It must happen a lot because it's unregulated.

1:15:21Jon McNeill:It's unregulated.

1:15:22Jen Cohen:Yeah.

1:15:22Jon McNeill:Right? So those are bad examples. But like, other than that, like maybe some technology stuff, if it doesn't work, if it doesn't, you'll never buy it again. Right. But you'll buy it once and you'll know, but like the product should be good enough.

1:15:35Jen Cohen:Well, I think like right now we see it in AI because like Microsoft has this product called Copilot, which doesn't hold a candle to Claude or to OpenAI's codex. And so eventually engineers show up and they're like, I'm not using Copilot. I got to use Cursor. I got to use Claude code. And in those cases, the best product wins.

1:15:55Jon McNeill:Yeah, that's true. Well, Claude is, I mean, that's true. Microsoft, I agree with you. Like they're, it's clunky. Yep. You know?

1:16:03Jen Cohen:Yeah, but really good Salesforce.

1:16:05Jon McNeill:Really good sales for us. Exactly.

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1:17:20Jon McNeill:Okay, well, I don't know how long it's been, but thank you for coming on this podcast.

1:17:24Jen Cohen:Yeah, it's been fun.

1:17:25Jon McNeill:Is there anything else that I forgot to ask you that's really important for like, you know, you talk about this hyper growth formula. Is there any other piece of material? Yeah, I'll give you two. Thank you, go ahead.

1:17:39Jen Cohen:So - Two. Two. So one is, and I call these the secret ingredients around the algorithm. And one of these like will be written about in the future is people try to understand Elon's leadership style and how he actually gets stuff done inside these companies. But here are the two principles. The first is what we call eat your own dog food, which is use your own product. And I can't tell you how many entrepreneurs and CEOs don't use their own product. And if you don't, then you're foregoing a whole feedback loop. I was with a group of banking CEOs and I said, raise your hand if you use your app on a regular basis, like weekly, monthly.

1:18:15Jen Cohen:Almost no hands went up. And I said, I knew that was gonna be the answer. You know why? because I use your apps and they suck. And if you were using them, you couldn't live with that suck for one more day. But you don't use them and therefore they're not getting better because you're not in the feedback loop. And so we used to take, each of us used to take a car off of the end of the factory line every night to go home. And we would drive the car home, we'd drive it back to the factory and we'd give engineers notes on the car. And the principle was, we have to eat our own dog food. We have to use our own product.

1:18:47Jen Cohen:And if we are, then we're going to be the first to spot flaws. And as an entrepreneur, as a leader, you can't live with those flaws. Like, why would you want to put your customer through that? So you fix them. It's great feedback loop. So that's thing one. Thing two, and this is kind of the genius of Elon, he concentrates on the one or two things that really, really matter in the company. And he finds those one or two things and he manages them weekly. So let's say I'm on a team that is now the number one issue on Elon's mind at Tesla. I am meeting with him once a week. And two things happen. One is that teams that meet with the CEO don't tend to bring their B game.

1:19:26Jen Cohen:They bring their A game. And so they're on their A game almost constantly. And they show forward progress every week. And if you're making progress every week and your competitor's not doing that, you're compounding progress against your competitor that stacks. And it gets really hard over time to compete with somebody who's doing that. And I think what they'll write about in the future about Elon's leadership at Tesla and SpaceX and his other companies is this weekly cadence thing that the CEO is driving personally turns out to be a huge advantage builder. And so like 10 years on from SpaceX's first successful launch, they now own 90 % of space launches.

1:20:04Jen Cohen:It gets really, really hard for a competitor to keep up with that or even catch up with that now because they every week are improving the way that that rocket gets built, the way that that rocket gets recovered, and the way that that rocket gets designed. And it's almost impossible to catch people like that.

1:20:21Jon McNeill:So what would you say the most important quality would be for a leader?

1:20:24Jen Cohen:I think drive a weekly cadence on the things that really matter in your business and use your own product so that you're making sure it meets your standards as a leader.

1:20:34Jon McNeill:That's so true because people are not using. I see that a lot actually.

1:20:38Jen Cohen:It's unbelievable. It floors me that people don't use their own product. It's why I insist on driving GM cars even as a board member. And it's why I was in two Lululemon stores today because I feel like I have to go eat the dog food.

1:20:52Jon McNeill:But you're not wearing any Lululemon.

1:20:53Jen Cohen:I'm wearing Lululemon shoes. I got a Lululemon shirt on, another Lululemon shirt on, Lululemon socks. So I've got, yeah, I want to eat the dog food.

1:21:03Jon McNeill:How are those Lululemon shoes? These are unbelievable.

1:21:06Jen Cohen:These are like the most comfortable running shoes I've ever had.

1:21:09Jon McNeill:What?

1:21:09Jen Cohen:Yeah. Yeah. And this is a newer product for us, but it's fantastic.

1:21:16Jon McNeill:You just finished telling me like the core pieces of clothing. Yeah. Should be the pants. Yeah. So why would they come up with shoes?

1:21:27Jen Cohen:Because our three core activities that we... Running. Is run, yoga, and train. So shoes. So these shoes, our customer actually looks to us for innovation in shoes. And what we found out was when we started to, this is a great example, like the algorithm in action. When we said, how are we going to design a shoe that anybody's going to care about? There's a lot of shoes on the market. We said, for women's shoes, how are they designed? So we started to question the requirements. And what we found out was all women's shoes are designed around a men's foot. Men's feet have determined the shape of women's running shoes.

1:22:04Jen Cohen:and so we went out and scanned tens of thousands of women's feet and created the first shoes like this base of the shoe is called a last it's the first last that's created for a woman's foot and then we launched that product it's the first women's shoe design around women's feet it's amazing it hadn't been done really we just asked the question like how do they get designed i should try on a pair of those shoes you should try them on let me know what you think what's the price

1:22:30Jon McNeill:point of those shoes?

1:22:31Jen Cohen:This is about$109. I think something like that.

1:22:33Jon McNeill:Oh, they're not, they're not as crazy expensive.

1:22:35Jen Cohen:They're not crazy expensive.

1:22:36Jon McNeill:But what's your cost on them? $8?

1:22:39Jen Cohen:No, it's well north of that, but I don't know what the cost of the shoes is. Great question.

1:22:43Jon McNeill:Do you get free clothing at Little Lemon? I buy it. You do? Yeah.

1:22:47Jen Cohen:Cause I want to go through the process. Yeah.

1:22:48Jon McNeill:You do. Okay. So what do you like? Would you like the process?

1:22:51Jen Cohen:I, I, there are things I do like about the process. Like there are people that are passionate in the stores about educating people about yoga, run, and train. And I love interacting with them. And they're really passionate about the product. Are the things we can improve? Definitely. And we're working on some of those.

1:23:06Jon McNeill:Would you go to Lululemon? They're looking for a CEO, I heard.

1:23:09Jen Cohen:No, I'm done being a CEO. Now I'm investing in other CEOs.

1:23:13Jon McNeill:Damn, okay. I was trying to catch you to see if you'd ever like it. Yeah, exactly.

1:23:16Jen Cohen:If I'd slip up. Yeah, exactly.

1:23:18Jon McNeill:So no lift again. No, no.

1:23:20Jen Cohen:No, I've got a bunch of investors that I've told I'm going to take good care of their money.

1:23:26Jon McNeill:So Okay, I feel like I want to make sure there's like, I have my computer with all my, I didn't even open my computer to ask you the questions I wrote down. Do you know that? But that's okay. I wanted to have a conversation with you. I don't like to usually like look at my questions.

1:23:41Jen Cohen:I like conversations too. That was super, it flowed super well.

1:23:44Jon McNeill:Like, I mean, did I forget anything else that's important about company business? Are you sure?

1:23:49Jen Cohen:Yeah.

1:23:50Jon McNeill:Because I really like the eat your own dog food. I think that's really important stuff. Okay, I want to ask you this because this is on a piece of paper that you guys, you know, wanted me to ask. I never ask these questions. But if you were mentoring a recent college grad, how would you tell them to use the algorithm?

1:24:05Jen Cohen:Ooh.

1:24:06Jon McNeill:Right? To stand out early in their career.

1:24:10Jen Cohen:I think when you come in and you can do two things. You can question assumptions and be a simplifier. You're going to stand out. And if you can do those two things, you tend to be able to figure out where the value is and you can add value. So back to the early part of our conversation, that's essentially how I was able to join Tesla was demonstrate value through simplifying and questioning assumptions. If you do these two things, you can apply the algorithm. And I think as a recent college grad, you can become very valuable and stand out from all your peers.

1:24:43Jon McNeill:So I'm going to ask you one more question about this because I know I've kind of asked you seven different ways. But what is your superpower then? Like you obviously can make the common sense seem calm. Like, you know, like you're picking up on like things that are very obvious to some, but obviously not that obvious at most. You go above and beyond. You like kind of like show your value, all those things. But what's that one thing that you're like software we got? With all that being said, what is your superpower?

1:25:11Jen Cohen:It's being able to simplify. I think that's it. Like it's a skill. It wasn't something I was born with, but it's something I learned over time. Yeah. Yeah.

1:25:18Jon McNeill:So you do such a good job at it.

1:25:20Jen Cohen:So important. Yeah. Because I think once you become a leader and people are looking to you, they need you to be very clear about what the goals are and what we're trying to accomplish. And to do that, you have to be a simplifier. Can't take a lot of words.

1:25:35Jon McNeill:I love it. Okay. The book is called The Algorithm by John McNeil, who is just, like I said, super impressive. I mean, your background is insane.

1:25:46Jen Cohen:Been super lucky.

1:25:47Jon McNeill:okay lucky and hard work luck doesn't just happen usually luck is opportunity and hard work that whole equation

1:25:59Jen Cohen:exactly

1:26:00Jon McNeill:so thank you for being on the podcast

1:26:02Jen Cohen:thanks for having me it's been fun

1:26:03Jon McNeill:it's been so fun and where else can we find more information about you if they were ever so curious

1:26:08Jen Cohen:you can find the book on Amazon and the book or the audiobook and you can find more about me on dvx.ventures.

1:26:19Jon McNeill:Amazing. Thank you so much. Thank you.